District charts a new course

CHULA VISTA – Chula Vista has become a nationally ranked hub for one of the most radical public education reforms of the past 15 years: the charter school.

Charter schools are publicly funded, but they operate free from many regulations that govern traditional schools. In exchange, the schools must deliver on pledges made in their founding documents, or charters, to improve learning. They have their own boards of directors.

A recent report by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools identified the Chula Vista Elementary School District as 10th in the nation in percentage of students enrolled in charter schools. By last school year's figures, it had 4,693 of its 26,891 students, or 17 percent, in charter schools.

The San Diego Unified School District has more students at charter schools than Chula Vista does, but its 13,937 students are less than 11 percent of total enrollment.

Chula Vista's charter-school boom has produced some unusual approaches to teaching. One of the district's six charter schools has started an after-school kindergarten program and dedicated a classroom to a teacher-education program.

Another had until recently handed over its management to a private for-profit corporation. A third has added middle school grades to the traditional kindergarten-through-sixth-grade format, as well as gender-separate classes. Yet another runs a schoolwide bilingual-immersion program.

Some charter schools arise as a rebellion against the constraints of district rules and management, but Chula Vista has openly encouraged the growth of the schools.

“When the train's coming, you can get on it or get run over by it,” said Chula Vista Superintendent Lowell Billings, who sits on the board of a charter school in South Los Angeles.

A report to the Chula Vista school board last month documents steady growth in the state academic ratings of district charter schools over the past eight years.

It's not clear from the report how much, if any, of the progress can be tied to their charter status because most of the rest of the district's 44 schools also have improved. Three Chula Vista charter schools' academic ratings declined last year.

There are individual instances of high achievement. At Mueller Charter School, which predominantly serves low-income students on Chula Vista's west side, 68 percent of seventh-graders scored at grade level on the state English test last year, compared with 44 percent of all South County seventh-graders.

With so many seemingly conflicting studies on charter schools done across the nation, researchers have yet to show whether the schools increase learning levels. That is in part because charter schools are as different from one another as they are from public schools.

Jim Groth, a longtime Chula Vista teachers union leader and charter-school skeptic, said the schools' promise of innovation has not yet been realized. Even in Chula Vista, he said, it's sometimes tough to distinguish a charter from a traditional public school.

“They're kind of like Puerto Rico. They're kind of like us, but they're not really us,” Groth said.

Clear View Elementary Charter School in Chula Vista's Terra Nova neighborhood hires its own gardeners instead of using more expensive public employees. Saving on landscaping and other services allows it to spend money in other places, such as longer kindergarten days for its English learners.

Jose Uriarte, 5, has been spending recent weeks after school at Clear View learning body parts in English. For Jose, distinguishing between the elbow and the whole arm is tricky. So are pronunciations. He pronounced the double “o” in “foot” the same way he pronounced it in the utterance he made when he botched a glue job: oops.

A few yards away is a college classroom. San Diego State University dispatches a professor to hold teacher-education classes in it, and the pupils learn their profession in part by practicing in Clear View classrooms.

Because school funding is tied to the number of students, the 220 children who come to Clear View from outside the neighborhood are a financial boon that gives the school the resources to experiment, Principal Sherrie Stogsdill-Posey said. If Clear View were a traditional public school, she said, the district could order it to take more students off its waiting list to fill the classroom occupied by the university.